July 5, 2024
I remember watching the CrossFit Games a while back. I’m not fit like that, I just ran out of things to watch and had no hobbies. And I remember seeing that their last names were all very familiar. I learned that these similar last names belonged to Icelandic people. After searching it up, I learned that they follow a patronymic surname convention, where they append "sson" to the first name of their father. Swedish people do this as well.
Many Nordic countries do some version of this too. The Danes append "sen" to the first name of their fathers. I think if you’re building a new civilization and as you grow, you need to name people with more specificity this would be my first choice, but it turns out last names were relatively new in these countries, so it’s not a long-standing tradition. The choice of conventions does still make sense when you realize that their populations have grown relatively slower, and you recognize the nature of the population growth. Communities are isolated. These are Nordic, northern, polar regions with overall populations that don’t really grow concentrically, and not very fast regardless. So, in some ways last names were probably a product of Western influence and their populations reaching a point where this is necessary.
I am West African, and in contrast, our names don’t follow this convention. We tend to have a lot of names, given by our family members and a religious first name. But, Yoruba names are more related to the occupation of your patrilineal ancestors. Our last names, however, have probably been around since the advent of the language, with estimates ranging around 11,000 years ago.
East Asian last names or at least Chinese ones are dynastic in nature. The reason for this is that you marry outside of your kin, clan, family, etc. But, I think this reason alone would mean that African last name conventions would be similar and we would have a lot more homogeneity, but I think it’s interesting that the partitions in East Asia are much larger, so the concept of dynasty is much larger. In that, at least abroad there are a few last names that are very popular.
I mean we do have Genghis Khan, et al. who were just very prolific in their, umm, procreation and who started these trees that kind of just continued and got wider. And so we have this power law situation where there’s probably a ton of really unique surnames, but they are represented in more rural communities and migrate to the West at a lower rate. I can think of more obscure reasons like men being more likely to move to cities, then they get married to women in the countryside and then the women with rarer last names no longer have them because last names are (generally) inherited from fathers. But this wasn't always in the case, apparently last names used to be matrynomic.
Anyway, another ethnic group with interesting last names are Sri Lankans. Sinhalese last names are very long. Apparently the transliteration to English makes them long, which can be the case for a lot of Nigerian names as well. It’s because of this linguistic convention where apparently “the vowel 'a' sound is incorporated into the letter.” According to Quora, “each syllable is represented by one letter.” I need to look into this more because I can’t really explain what that means in practice.